Accounting and Management Practices in Italian Local Governments

In the last quarter of a century, the evolution of the accounting system of Italian local governments has reflected the economic and social changes experienced by the country. In fact, the stagnations and accelerations described in this work coincided, during the passage from the first to the second Republic (years 1992-1994), with the worst decline of the public administration environment and, in the current period of transition towards the third Republic (2013) with the EU membership. Besides the new accounting tools, the regulations also aimed at introducing some management enhancement with explicit reference to management models taken from the operating experience of the companies, in an attempt to influence the culture and behaviours of the players. This project, however, has substantially failed because it has never been supported all the way and it has been, in fact, disturbed by continuous legislative measures consequence of the various emergencies experienced by the country. Also the lobbies connected to the Italian public system had their share of responsibility in delaying parts of the reforms or in not having applied them thoroughly or in having applied them with a short-sighted approach, always pursuing some immediate advantage. This led to a modus operandi in which the accounting system has never educated the players on its use within the decision making processes as hoped for by the legislator. All this, however, instead of adjusting the correct application of the system and its tools to the problems encountered, caused the system to be questioned again, in the manners that will be described below, and led to the adoption of a more complex accounting system that, given the current shortage of human and financial resources in the local public administrations, is not going to succeed, in the opinion of the author, where the previous project failed, but will hold back the elusive managerial behaviours encountered in the last few years.